In the Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln said America was “conceived in liberty.” Today we might call that our country’s unique selling proposition. While other nations emphasized biological unity, America in the 20th century finally became a liberty theme park where people of all skin colors and ethnicities could together enjoy the thrill rides of building families and careers.
On our national roller coaster, we’ve had the right to wave hands as long as we do not hit the noses of our neighbors. George Washington defined this liberty theme park well in a Bible-oriented letter to a Jewish synagogue in 1790: “Everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid” (an allusion to Micah 4:4).
Legal racial segregation has disappeared, but on our 250th anniversary tomorrow, we should remember a roadblock that appeared shortly before our 200th: In 1973, the US Supreme Court ruled that unborn children had no right to life. A redefinition of liberty followed in Justice Anthony Kennedy’s 1992 defense of abortion: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”
Earlier, liberty meant “live and let live”—but live within a common reality that does not include file cabinets marked “my facts” and “your facts.” That’s not true now. Post-Kennedy and within postmodernism, we feel entitled to live with internet algorithms that feed us only the news we feel fit to imprint on our brains.
https://t.co/AKOUNAujbW Still a Restless Nation, Unless We Rest in God
— Ken Ragsdale (@ken_ragsdale) July 4, 2026
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.